It was discovered this evening that the iPhone can get BBC iPlayer radio programmes in higher quality MP3 format. It basically uses the same method used for the iPhone video downloads. get_iplayer v0.74 now supports this fully and can also fallback to RealAudio format for those shows that still have not been made available to the iPhone. The MP3s are 128kbps stereo 44.1kHz – better than the rather sad 64kbps realaudio streams we had before. Shame there are no ID3 tags yet – come on BBC 🙂
For reverting to downloading the realaudio streams in get_iplayer you must use the –amode=realaudio option.